RAYNHAM, Mass., March 31, 2008 – MEGA International today announced that the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES), in the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), is using the MEGA Modeling Suite to improve work processes, identify inefficiencies and redundancies in systems, and integrate the organization at a functional level.

CSREES advances knowledge for agriculture, the environment, human health, and communities by supporting research and education through a grants program of $1.2 billion each year. These grants go to thousands of recipients for research and education in some 60 program areas.

With this large grants program, it became more essential to fully document the entire process, which is quite complex. However, CSREES had a very basic enterprise architecture that did not provide a comprehensive picture of the agency’s efforts and most records were still on paper.

The agency recognized the value of developing a complete enterprise architecture; it would improve knowledge and understanding of CSREES processes and responsibilities within the organization, and meet new departmental regulations on EA that were evolving. This presented a significant opportunity to improve productivity and efficiency by reducing the amount of transactions occurring using paper and fax.

Once the agency realized the value of EA, and how important it would be to discover, understand, align, and control information throughout the agency, it moved ahead quickly to develop an EA program.

CSREES selected the MEGA Modeling Suite as its EA solution, to help the agency align its technical infrastructure and support systems with the functions and services provided to constituents. CSREES uses five of the modules from the MEGA Modeling Suite: MEGA Process, MEGA Architecture, MEGA Designer, MEGA Publisher, and MEGA Exchange. CSREES chose MEGA International because of the company's ability to provide a complete, cost-effective solution of software, training, and consulting, and the full breadth of EA modeling, reporting, and impact analysis.

CSREES has three units within the agency; all three have adopted the EA solution, and CSREES has three data repositories … baseline, current, and target … with 20,000+ objects. Most of the 350 agency employees are business users who rely on the output of the data repository through the Intranet to better understand information such as the business models, technologies, the state of the application infrastructure, and strategic goals for programs.

CSREES has seen several benefits of its move to enterprise architecture. It has greatly facilitated communication and change within the agency, enabled better use of resources, increased efficiency, and sharpened organizational performance. The agency has reduced costs by identifying and eliminating redundancies and inefficiencies. And, access to information has improved significantly.

There has been very positive response within CSREES. After the first few agency groups deployed the solution, others began to clamor for it. The process of instituting EA facilitated discussions among business units about how they could change and improve processes. According to CSREES, it has really changed how the agency works.

MEGA International offers the MEGA Modeling Suite for business process analysis (BPA) and enterprise architecture (EA) and the Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) Suite. It is a privately-held company, with 45,000 software licenses worldwide. Clients include AT&T, DirecTV, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, Morgan Stanley, NASA, Nissan, Wyeth, and the US Departments of Homeland Security and Transportation.

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